“Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” Alice Murno, from the intro to Moons of Jupiter

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see." Arthur Schopenhauer

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope.’” –Thomas Cromwell imagines asking Thomas More—Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Monday, April 8, 2013

Capuchin-22: A Review of “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates” by Frans De Waal

Whenever literary folk
talk about voice, that supposedly ineffable but transcendently important
quality of narration, they display an exasperating penchant for vagueness, as
if so lofty a dimension to so lofty an endeavor couldn’t withstand being spoken
of directly—or as if they took delight in instilling panic and self-doubt into
the quivering hearts of aspiring authors. What the folk who actually know what
they mean by voice actually mean by it is all the idiosyncratic elements of
prose that give readers a stark and persuasive impression of the narrator as a
character. Discussions of what makes for stark and persuasive characters, on
the other hand, are vague by necessity. It must be noted that many characters
even outside of fiction are neither. As a first step toward developing a feel
for how character can be conveyed through writing, we may consider the
nonfiction work of real people with real character, ones who also happen to be
practiced authors.

The Dutch-American
primatologist Frans de Waal is one such real-life character, and his prose
stands as testament to the power of written language, lonely ink on colorless
pages, not only to impart information, but to communicate personality and to
make a contagion of states and traits like enthusiasm, vanity, fellow-feeling,
bluster, big-heartedness, impatience, and an abiding wonder. De Waal is a
writer with voice. Many other scientists and science writers explore this
dimension to prose in their attempts to engage readers, but few avoid the traps
of being goofy or obnoxious instead of funny—a trap David Pogue, for instance,
falls into routinely as he hosts NOVA on PBS—and of expending far too much
effort in their attempts at being distinctive, thus failing to achieve anything
resembling grace.

The most striking quality of de Waal’s writing, however,
isn’t that its good-humored quirkiness never seems strained or contrived, but
that it never strays far from the man’s own obsession with getting at the
stories behind the behaviors he so minutely observes—whether the characters are
his fellow humans or his fellow primates, or even such seemingly unstoried
creatures as rats or turtles. But to say that de Waal is an animal lover
doesn’t quite capture the essence of what can only be described as a compulsive
fascination marked by conviction—the conviction that when he peers into the
eyes of a creature others might dismiss as an automaton, a bundle of twitching
flesh powered by preprogrammed instinct, he sees something quite different,
something much closer to the workings of his own mind and those of his fellow humans.

De Waal’s latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of
Humanism among the Primates, reprises the main themes of his previous
books, most centrally the continuity between humans and other primates, with an
eye toward answering the questions of where does,
and where should morality come from.
Whereas in his books from the years leading up to the turn of the century he
again and again had to challenge what he calls “veneer theory,” the notion that
without a process of socialization that imposes rules on individuals from
some outside source they’d all be greedy and selfish monsters, de Waal has
noticed over the past six or so years a marked shift in the zeitgeist toward an
awareness of our more cooperative and even altruistic animal urgings. Noting a
sharp difference over the decades in how audiences at his lectures respond to
recitations of the infamous quote by biologist Michael Ghiselin, “Scratch an
altruist and watch a hypocrite bleed,” de Waal writes,

Although
I have featured this cynical line for decades in my lectures, it is only since
about 2005 that audiences greet it with audible gasps and guffaws as something
so outrageous, so out of touch with how they see themselves, that they can’t
believe it was ever taken seriously. Had the author never had a friend? A
loving wife? Or a dog, for that matter? (43)

The assumption underlying veneer theory was that
without civilizing influences humans’ deeper animal impulses would express
themselves unchecked. The further assumption was that animals, the end products
of the ruthless, eons-long battle for survival and reproduction, would reflect
the ruthlessness of that battle in their behavior. De Waal’s first book, Chimpanzee Politics, which told the
story of a period of intensified competition among the captive male chimps at
the Arnhem Zoo for alpha status, with all the associated perks like first dibs
on choice cuisine and sexually receptive females, was actually seen by many as
lending credence to these assumptions. But de Waal himself was far from
convinced that the primates he studied were invariably, or even predominantly,
violent and selfish.

Illustration of Veneer Theory

What
he observed at the zoo in Arnhem was far from the chaotic and bloody
free-for-all it would have been if the chimps took the kind of delight in
violence for its own sake that many people imagine them being disposed to. As
he pointed out in his second book, Peacemaking among Primates, the violence is almost invariably attended by obvious signs
of anxiety on the part of those participating in it, and the tension
surrounding any major conflict quickly spreads throughout the entire community.
The hierarchy itself is in fact an adaptation that serves as a check on the
incessant conflict that would ensue if the relative status of each individual
had to be worked out anew every time one chimp encountered another. “Tightly
embedded in society,” he writes in The
Bonobo and the Atheist, “they respect the limits it puts on their behavior
and are ready to rock the boat only if they can get away with it or if so much
is at stake that it’s worth the risk” (154). But the most remarkable thing de
Waal observed came in the wake of the fights that couldn’t successfully be
avoided. Chimps, along with primates of several other species, reliably make
reconciliatory overtures toward one another after they’ve come to blows—and
bites and scratches. In light of such reconciliations, primate violence begins
to look like a momentary, albeit potentially dangerous, readjustment to a
regularly peaceful social order rather than any ongoing melee, as individuals
with increasing or waning strength negotiate a stable new arrangement.

Part
of the enchantment of de Waal’s writing is his judicious and deft balancing of
anecdotes about the primates he works with on the one hand and descriptions of
controlled studies he and his fellow researchers conduct on the other. In The Bonobo and the Atheist, he strikes a
more personal note than he has in any of his previous books, at points
stretching the bounds of the popular science genre and crossing into the realm
of memoir. This attempt at peeling back the surface of that other veneer, the
white-coated scientist’s posture of mechanistic objectivity and impassive
empiricism, works best when de Waal is merging tales of his animal experiences
with reports on the research that ultimately provides evidence for what was
originally no more than an intuition. Discussing a recent, and to most people
somewhat startling, experiment pitting the social against the alimentary
preferences of a distant mammalian cousin, he recounts,

Despite
the bad reputation of these animals, I have no trouble relating to its findings,
having kept rats as pets during my college years. Not that they helped me
become popular with the girls, but they taught me that rats are clean, smart,
and affectionate. In an experiment at
the University of Chicago, a rat was placed in an enclosure where it
encountered a transparent container with another rat. This rat was locked up,
wriggling in distress. Not only did the first rat learn how to open a little
door to liberate the second, but its motivation to do so was astonishing. Faced
with a choice between two containers, one with chocolate chips and another with
a trapped companion, it often rescued its companion first. (142-3)

This experiment, conducted by Inbal Ben-Ami
Bartal, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason, actually got a lot of media coverage;
Mason was even interviewed for an episode of NOVA
Science NOW where you can watch a video of the rats performing the
jailbreak and sharing the chocolate (and you can also see David Pogue being
obnoxious.) This type of coverage has probably played a role in the shift in
public opinion regarding the altruistic propensities of humans and animals. But
if there’s one species who’s behavior can be said to have undermined the
cynicism underlying veneer theory—aside from our best friend the dog of course—it
would have to be de Waal’s leading character, the bonobo.

De
Waal’s 1997 book Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, on which he collaborated with
photographer Frans Lanting, introduced this charismatic, peace-loving,
sex-loving primate to the masses, and in the process provided behavioral
scientists with a new model for what our own ancestors’ social lives might have
looked like. Bonobo females dominate the males to the point where zoos have
learned never to import a strange male into a new community without the
protection of his mother. But for the most part any tensions, even those over
food, even those between members of neighboring groups, are resolved through
genito-genital rubbing—a behavior that looks an awful lot like sex and often
culminates in vocalizations and facial expressions that resemble those of
humans experiencing orgasms to a remarkable degree. The implications of bonobos’
hippy-like habits have even reached into politics. After an
uncharacteristically ill-researched and ill-reasoned article in the New Yorker by Ian Parker which suggested
that the apes weren’t as peaceful and erotic as we’d been led to believe,
conservatives couldn’t help celebrating. De Waal writes in The Bonobo and the Atheist,

Given
that this ape’s reputation has been a thorn in the side of homophobes as well
as Hobbesians, the right-wing media jumped with delight. The bonobo “myth”
could finally be put to rest, and nature remain red in tooth and claw. The
conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza accused “liberals” of having fashioned
the bonobo into their mascot, and he urged them to stick with the donkey. (63)

But most primate researchers think the behavioral differences
between chimps and bonobos are pretty obvious. De Waal points out that while violence
does occur among the apes on rare occasions “there are no confirmed reports of
lethal aggression among bonobos” (63). Chimps, on the other hand, have been
observed doing all kinds of killing. Bonobos also outperform chimps in experiments
designed to test their capacity for cooperation, as in the setup that
requires two individuals to pull on a rope at the same time in order for either
of them to get ahold of food placed atop a plank of wood. (Incidentally, the New Yorker’s track record when it comes
to anthropology is suspiciously checkered—disgraced author Patrick Tierney’s discredited
book on Napoleon Chagnon, for instance, was originally excerpted
in the magazine.)

Chim (left), a bonobo, and Panzee (right), a chimp, with Yerkes.

Bonobos
came late to the scientific discussion of what ape behavior can tell us about
our evolutionary history. The famous chimp researcher Robert Yerkes, whose name
graces the facility de Waal currently directs at Emory University in Atlanta,
actually wrote an entire book called Almost
Human about what he believed was a rather remarkable chimp. A photograph
from that period reveals that it wasn’t a chimp at all. It was a bonobo. Now, as
this species is becoming better researched, and with the discovery of fossils
like the 4.4 million-year-old Ardipethicus ramidusknown
as Ardi, a bipedal ape with fangs that are quite small when compared to the
lethal daggers sported by chimps, the role of violence in our ancestry is ever
more uncertain. De Waal writes,

What
if we descend not from a blustering chimp-like ancestor but from a gentle,
empathic bonobo-like ape? The bonobo’s body proportions—its long legs and
narrow shoulders—seem to perfectly fit the descriptions of Ardi, as do its
relatively small canines. Why was the bonobo overlooked? What if the
chimpanzee, instead of being an ancestral prototype, is in fact a violent
outlier in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage? Ardi is telling us
something, and there may exist little agreement about what she is saying, but I
hear a refreshing halt to the drums of war that have accompanied all previous scenarios.
(61)

Ardi

De Waal is well aware of all the behaviors humans
engage in that are more emblematic of chimps than of bonobos—in his 2005 book Our Inner Ape, he refers to humans as
“the bipolar ape”—but the fact that our genetic relatedness to both species is
exactly the same, along with the fact that chimps also have a surprising
capacity for peacemaking and empathy, suggest to him that evolution has had
plenty of time and plenty of raw material to instill in us the emotional
underpinnings of a morality that emerges naturally—without having to be imposed
by religion or philosophy. “Rather than having developed morality from scratch
through rational reflection,” he writes in The Bonobo and the Atheist, “we received a huge push in the rear
from our background as social animals" (17).

In
the eighth and final chapter of The
Bonobo and the Atheist, titled “Bottom-Up Morality,” de Waal describes what
he believes is an alternative to top-down theories that attempt to derive
morals from religion on the one hand and from reason on the other. Invisible
beings threatening eternal punishment can frighten us into doing the right
thing, and principles of fairness might offer slight nudges in the direction of
proper comportment, but we must already have some intuitive sense of right and
wrong for either of these belief systems to operate on if they’re to be at all
compelling. Many people assume moral intuitions are inculcated in childhood,
but experiments like the one that showed rats will come to the aid of
distressed companions suggest something deeper, something more ingrained, is
involved. De Waal has found that a video of capuchin monkeys demonstrating "inequity aversion"—a natural, intuitive sense of fairness—does a much better job
than any charts or graphs at getting past the prejudices of philosophers and
economists who want to insist that fairness is too complex a principle for mere
monkeys to comprehend. He writes,

This
became an immensely popular experiment in which one monkey received cucumber
slices while another received grapes for the same task. The monkeys had no
trouble performing if both received identical rewards of whatever quality, but
rejected unequal outcomes with such vehemence that there could be little doubt
about their feelings. I often show their reactions to audiences, who almost fall
out of their chairs laughing—which I interpret as a sign of surprised
recognition. (232)

What the capuchins do when they see someone else
getting a better reward is throw the measly cucumber back at the experimenter
and proceed to rattle the cage in agitation. De Waal compares it to the Occupy
Wall Street protests. The poor monkeys clearly recognize the insanity of the
human they’re working for.

There’s
still a long way to travel, however, from helpful rats and protesting capuchins
before you get to human morality. But that gap continues to shrink as
researchers find new ways to explore the social behaviors of the primates that
are even more closely related to us. Chimps, for instance, have
been seen taking inequity aversion an important step beyond what monkeys
display. Not only will certain individuals refuse to work for lesser rewards;
they’ll refuse to work even for the superior rewards if they see their
companions aren’t being paid equally. De Waal does acknowledge though that
there still remains an important step between these behaviors and human
morality. “I am reluctant to call a chimpanzee a ‘moral being,’” he writes.

This
is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system
and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of
life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be morally wrong. These
debates are uniquely human. There is little evidence that other animals judge
the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves. (17-8)

Moral intuitions can often inspire some behaviors
that to people in modern liberal societies seem appallingly immoral. De Waal
quotes anthropologist Christopher
Boehm on the “special, pejorative moral ‘discount’ applied to cultural
strangers—who often are not even considered fully human,” and he goes on to
explain that “The more we expand morality’s reach, the more we need to rely on
our intellect.” But the intellectual principles must be grounded in the
instincts and emotions we evolved as social primates; this is what he means by
bottom-up morality or “naturalized ethics” (235).

*****

Capuchins

In
locating the foundations of morality in our evolved emotions—propensities we share
with primates and even rats—de Waal seems to be taking a firm stand against any
need for religion. But he insists throughout the book that this isn’t the case.
And, while the idea that people are quite capable of playing fair and treating
each other with compassion without any supernatural policing may seem to land
him squarely in the same camp as prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins and
Christopher Hitchens, whom he calls “neo-atheists,” he contends that they’re
just as, if not more, misguided than the people of faith who believe the rules
must be handed down from heaven. “Even though Dawkins cautioned against his own
anthropomorphism of the gene,” de Waal wrote all the way back in his 1996 book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong
in Humans and Other Animals, “with the passage of time, carriers of
selfish genes became selfish by association” (14). Thus de Waal tries to find
some middle ground between religious dogmatists on one side and those who are equally
dogmatic in their opposition to religion and equally mistaken in their espousal
of veneer theory on the other. “I consider dogmatism a far greater threat
than religion per se,” he writes in The
Bonobo and the Atheist.

I am
particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the
blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the “neo-atheists” of today so
obsessed with God’s nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts
proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism? What does
atheism have to offer that’s worth fighting for? (84)

For de Waal, neo-atheism is an empty placeholder
of a philosophy, defined not by any positive belief but merely by an
obstinately negative attitude toward religion. It’s hard to tell early on in
his book if this view is based on any actual familiarity with the books whose
titles—The God Delusion, god is not Great—he takes issue with.
What is obvious, though, is that he’s trying to appeal to some spirit of
moderation so that he might reach an audience who may have already been turned
off by the stridency of the debates over religion’s role in society. At any
rate, we can be pretty sure that Hitchens, for one, would have had something to say about de Waal’s characterization.

De Waal’s expertise as a
primatologist gave him what was in many ways an ideal perspective on the
selfish gene debates, as well as on sociobiology more generally, much the
way Sarah
Blaffer Hrdy’s expertise has done for her. The monkeys and apes de Waal
works with are a far cry from the ants and wasps that originally inspired the
gene-centered approach to explaining behavior. “There are the bees dying for
their hive,” he writes in The Bonobo and
the Atheist,

and
the millions of slime mold cells that build a single, sluglike organism that permits
a few among them to reproduce. This kind of sacrifice was put on the same level
as the man jumping into an icy river to rescue a stranger or the chimpanzee
sharing food with a whining orphan. From an evolutionary perspective, both
kinds of helping are comparable, but psychologically speaking they are
radically different. (33)

At the same time, though, de Waal gets to see up
close almost every day how similar we are to our evolutionary cousins, and the
continuities leave no question as to the wrongheadedness of blank slate ideas
about socialization. “The road between genes and behavior is far from straight,”
he writes, sounding a note similar to that of the late Stephen
Jay Gould, “and the psychology that produces altruism deserves as much attention
as the genes themselves.” He goes on to explain,

Mammals
have what I call an “altruistic impulse” in that they respond to signs of distress
in others and feel an urge to improve their situation. To recognize the need of
others, and react appropriately, is really not the same as a preprogrammed
tendency to sacrifice oneself for the genetic good. (33)

We can’t discount the role of biology, in other
words, but we must keep in mind that genes are at the distant end of a long
chain of cause and effect that has countless other inputs before it links to emotion and behavior. De Waal angered both the social constructivists and quite a few of
the gene-centered evolutionists, but by now the balanced view his work as
primatologist helped him to arrive at has, for the most part, won the day. Now, in
his other role as a scientist who studies the evolution of morality, he wants to strike a similar balance between extremists on both sides of the
religious divide. Unfortunately, in this new arena, his perspective isn’t
anywhere near as well informed.

The type of religion de Waal points to as
evidence that the neo-atheists’ concerns are misguided and excessive is
definitely moderate. It’s not even based on any actual beliefs, just some nice
ideas and stories adherents enjoy hearing and thinking about in a spirit of
play. We have to wonder, though, just how prevalent this New Age, Life-of-Pi type of religion
really is. I suspect the passages in The
Bonobo and the Atheist discussing it are going to be equally offensive to
atheists and people of actual faith alike. Here’s one example of the bizarre way he writes about religion:

Neo-atheists
are like people standing outside a movie theater telling us that Leonardo
DiCaprio didn’t really go down with the Titanic.
How shocking! Most of us are perfectly comfortable with the duality. Humor
relies on it, too, lulling us into one way of looking at a situation only to
hit us over the head with another. To enrich reality is one of the most
delightful capacities we have, from pretend play in childhood to visions of an
afterlife when we grow older. (294)

He seems to be suggesting that the religious know,
on some level, their beliefs aren’t true. “Some realities exist,” he writes,
“some we just like to believe in” (294). The problem is that while many readers
may enjoy the innuendo about humorless and inveterately over-literal atheists,
most believers aren’t joking around—even the non-extremists are more serious
than de Waal seems to think.

As
someone who’s been reading de Waal’s books for the past seventeen years,
someone who wanted to strangle Ian Parker after reading his cheap smear piece
in The New Yorker, someone who has
admired the great primatologist since my days as an undergrad anthropology
student, I experienced the sections of The
Bonobo and the Atheist devoted to criticisms of neo-atheism, which make up
roughly a quarter of this short book, as soul-crushingly disappointing. And
I’ve agonized over how to write this part of the review. The middle path de Waal carves out
is between a watered-down religion believers don’t really believe on one side
and an egregious postmodern caricature of Sam Harris’s and Christopher
Hitchens’s positions on the other. He focuses on Harris because of his book, The
Moral Landscape, which explores how we might use science to determine
our morals and values instead of religion, but he gives every indication of
never having actually read the book and of instead basing his criticisms solely on
the book’s reputation among Harris’s most hysterical detractors. And he targets
Hitchens because he thinks he has the psychological key to understanding what
he refers to as his “serial dogmatism.” But de Waal’s case is so flimsy a
freshman journalism student could demolish it with no more than about ten
minutes of internet fact-checking.

De Waal does acknowledge
that we should be skeptical of “religious institutions and their ‘primates’,”
but he wonders “what good could possibly come from insulting the many people
who find value in religion?” (19). This is the tightrope he tries to walk throughout
his book. His focus on the purely negative aspect of atheism juxtaposed with
his strange conception of the role of belief seems designed to give readers the
impression that if the atheists succeed society might actually suffer severe
damage. He writes,

Religion
is much more than belief. The question is not so much whether religion is true
or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place
if we were to get rid of it the way an Aztec priest rips the beating heart out
of a virgin. What could fill the gaping hole and take over the removed organ’s
functions? (216)

The first problem is that many people who call
themselves humanists, as de Waal does, might suggest that there are in fact
many things that could fill the gap—science, literature, philosophy, music, cinema,
human rights activism, just to name a few. But the second problem is that the
militancy of the militant atheists is purely and avowedly rhetorical. In a debate with Hitchens, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair once held
up the same straw man that de Waal drags through the pages of his book, the
claim that neo-atheists are trying to extirpate religion from society entirely,
to which Hitchens replied, “In fairness, no one was arguing that religion
should or will die out of the world. All I’m arguing is that it would be better
if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism” (20:20).
What Hitchens is after is an end to the deference automatically afforded
religious ideas by dint of their supposed sacredness; religious ideas need to
be critically weighed just like any other ideas—and when they are thus weighed
they often don’t fare so well, in either logical or moral terms. It’s hard to
understand why de Waal would have a problem with this view.

Sam Harris

*****

De
Waal’s position is even more incoherent with regard to Harris’s arguments about the potential for a science of morality, since they represent an attempt to answer, at least in part, the very question of what
might take the place of religion in providing guidance in our lives that he
poses again and again throughout The Bonobo and the Atheist.
De Waal takes issue first with the book’s title, The Moral Landscape: How Science can Determine Human Values.
The notion that science might determine any aspect of morality suggests to him
a top-down approach as opposed to his favored bottom-up strategy that takes
“naturalized ethics” as its touchstone. This is, however, unbeknownst to de Waal, a
mischaracterization of Harris’s thesis. Rather than engage Harris’s arguments in
any direct or meaningful way, de Waal contents himself with following in the
footsteps of critics who apply the postmodern strategy of holding the book to
account for all the analogies that can be drawn with it, no matter how
tenuously or tendentiously, to historical evils. De Waal writes, for instance,

While
I do welcome a science of morality—my own work is part of it—I can’t fathom
calls for science to determine human
values (as per the subtitle of Sam Harris’s The
Moral Landscape). Is pseudoscience something of the past? Are modern
scientists free from moral biases? Think of the Tuskegee syphilis study just a
few decades ago, or the ongoing involvement of medical doctors in prisoner
torture at Guantanamo Bay. I am profoundly skeptical of the moral purity of
science, and feel that its role should never exceed that of morality’s
handmaiden. (22)

(Great phrase that "morality's handmaiden.") But Harris never argues that scientists are any
more morally pure than anyone else. His argument is for the application of that
“science of morality,” which de Waal proudly contributes to, to attempts at
addressing the big moral issues our society faces.

The
guilt-by-association and guilt-by-historical-analogy tactics on display in The Bonobo and the Atheist extend all
the way to that lodestar of postmodernism’s hysterical obsessions. We might
hope that de Waal, after witnessing the frenzied insanity of the sociobiology
controversy from the front row, would know better. But he doesn’t seem to grasp
how toxic this type of rhetoric is to reasoned discourse and honest inquiry.
After expressing his bafflement at how science and a naturalistic worldview
could inspire good the way religion does (even though his main argument is that
such external inspiration to do good is unnecessary), he writes,

It
took Adolf Hitler and his henchmen to expose the moral bankruptcy of these
ideas. The inevitable result was a precipitous drop of faith in science,
especially biology. In the 1970s, biologists were still commonly equated with
fascists, such as during the heated protest against “sociobiology.” As a
biologist myself, I am glad those acrimonious days are over, but at the same
time I wonder how anyone could forget this past and hail science as our moral
savior. How did we move from deep distrust to naïve optimism? (22)

Was Nazism
borne of an attempt to apply science to moral questions? It’s true some people
use science in evil ways, but not nearly as commonly as people are directly
urged by religion to perpetrate evils like inquisitions or holy wars. When
science has directly inspired evil, as in the case of eugenics, the lifespan of
the mistake was measurable in years or decades rather than centuries or
millennia. Not to minimize the real human costs, but science wins hands down by being
self-correcting and, certain individual scientists notwithstanding, undogmatic.

Harris intended for his
book to begin a debate he was prepared to actively participate in. But he
quickly ran into the problem that postmodern criticisms can’t really be dealt
with in any meaningful way. The following long quote from Harris’s response
to his battier critics in the Huffington
Post will show both that de Waal’s characterization of his argument is way
off-the-mark, and that it is suspiciously unoriginal:

How, for instance, should I respond to the
novelist Marilynne Robinson’s paranoid, anti-science gabbling in the Wall Street Journal where she consigns me to the company of the
lobotomists of the mid 20th century? Better not to try, I think—beyond
observing how difficult it can be to know whether a task is above or beneath
you. What about the science writer John Horgan, who was kind enough to review
my book twice, once in Scientific
American where he
tarred me with the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the abuse of the
mentally ill, and eugenics, and once in The Globe and
Mail, where he added
Nazism and Marxism for good measure? How does one graciously respond to non
sequiturs? The purpose of The Moral Landscape is to argue that we can,
in principle, think about moral truth in the context of science. Robinson and
Horgan seem to imagine that the mere existence of the Nazi doctors counts
against my thesis. Is it really so difficult to distinguish between a science
of morality and the morality of science? To assert that moral truths exist, and
can be scientifically understood, is not to say that all (or any) scientists
currently understand these truths or that those who do will necessarily conform
to them.

And we
have to ask further what alternative source of ethical principles do the
self-righteous grandstanders like Robinson and Horgan—and now de Waal—have to
offer? In their eagerness to compare everyone to the Nazis, they seem to be deriving their own morality from Fox News.

De Waal makes three objections to Harris’s
arguments that are of actual substance, but none of them are anywhere near as
devastating to his overall case as de Waal makes out. First, Harris begins with
the assumption that moral behaviors lead to “human flourishing,” but this is a
presupposed value as opposed to an empirical finding of science—or so de Waal
claims. But here’s de Waal himself on a level of morality sometimes seen in
apes that transcends one-on-one interactions between individuals:

female
chimpanzees have been seen to drag reluctant males toward each other to make up
after a fight, while removing weapons from their hands. Moreover, high-ranking
males regularly act as impartial arbiters to settle disputes in the community.
I take these hints of community concern
as a sign that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity, and
that we don’t need God to explain how we got to where we are today. (20)

The similarity between the concepts of human
flourishing and community concern highlights one of the main areas of confusion
de Waal could have avoided by actually reading Harris’s book. The word
“determine” in the title has two possible meanings. Science can determine
values in the sense that it can guide us toward behaviors that will bring about
flourishing. But it can also determine our values in the sense of discovering
what we already naturally value and hence what conditions need to be met for us to flourish.

De Waal performs a
sleight of hand late in The Bonobo and
the Atheist, substituting another “utilitarian” for Harris, justifying the
trick by pointing out that utilitarians also seek to maximize human flourishing—though
Harris never claims to be one. This leads de Waal to object that strict
utilitarianism isn’t viable because he’s more likely to direct his resources to
his own ailing mother than to any stranger in need, even if those resources
would benefit the stranger more. Thus de Waal faults Harris’s ethics for
overlooking the role of loyalty in human lives. His third criticism is similar;
he worries that utilitarians might infringe on the rights of a minority to
maximize flourishing for a majority. But how, given what we know about human
nature, could we expect humans to flourish—to feel as though they were flourishing—in a society that didn’t
properly honor friendship and the bonds of family? How could humans be happy in
a society where they had to constantly fear being sacrificed to the whim of the
majority? It is in precisely this effort to discover—or determine—under which
circumstances humans flourish that Harris believes science can be of the most
help. And as de Waal moves up from his mammalian foundations of morality to
more abstract ethical principles the separation between his approach and
Harris’s starts to look suspiciously like a distinction without a difference.

Harris in fact points out that honoring family bonds probably leads to greater well-being on pages seventy-three and seventy-four of The Moral Landscape, and de Waal quotes from page seventy-four himself to chastise Harris for concentrating too much on "the especially low-hanging fruit of conservative Islam" (74). The incoherence of de Waal's argument (and the carelessness of his research) are on full display here as he first responds to a point about the genital mutilation of young girls by asking, "Isn't genital mutilation common in the United States, too, where newborn males are circumcised without their consent?" (90). So cutting off the foreskin of a male's penis is morally equivalent to cutting off a girl's clitoris? Supposedly, the equivalence implies that there can't be any reliable way to determine the relative moral status of religious practices. "Could it be that religion and culture interact to the point that there is no universal morality?" Perhaps, but, personally, as a circumcised male, I think this argument is a real howler.

*****

The slick scholarly
laziness on display in The Bonobo and the
Atheist is just as bad when it comes to the positions, and the personality,
of Christopher Hitchens, whom de Waal sees fit to psychoanalyze instead of
engaging his arguments in any substantive way—but whose memoir, Hitch-22,
he’s clearly never bothered to read. The straw man about the neo-atheists being
bent on obliterating religion entirely is, disappointingly, but not
surprisingly by this point, just one of several errors and misrepresentations.
De Waal’s main argument against Hitchens, that his atheism is just another
dogma, just as much a religion as any other, is taken right from the list of
standard talking points the most incurious of religious apologists like to
recite against him. Theorizing that “activist atheism reflects trauma” (87)—by
which he means that people raised under severe religions will grow up to espouse
severe ideologies of one form or another—de Waal goes on to suggest that
neo-atheism is an outgrowth of “serial dogmatism”:

Hitchens
was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from
Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American
Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all of the
world’s troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right,
from anti-Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra
God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa. (89)

This is truly awful rubbish, and it’s really too
bad Hitchens isn’t around anymore to take de Waal to task for it himself. First,
this passage allows us to catch out de Waal’s abuse of the term dogma;
dogmatism is rigid adherence to beliefs that aren’t open to questioning. The
test of dogmatism is whether you’re willing to adjust your views in light of
new evidence or changing circumstances—it has nothing to do with how willing or
eager you are to debate. What de Waal is labeling dogmatism is what we normally
call outspokenness. Second, his facts are simply wrong. For one, though
Hitchens was labeled a neocon by some of his fellows on the left simply because
he supported the invasion of Iraq, he never considered himself one. When he was
asked in an
interview for the New Stateman if
he was a neoconservative, he responded unequivocally, “I’m not a conservative of any kind.” Finally,
can’t someone be for one war and against another, or agree with certain aspects
of a religious or political leader’s policies and not others, without being shiftily
dogmatic?

De
Waal never really goes into much detail about what the “naturalized ethics” he
advocates might look like beyond insisting that we should take a bottom-up
approach to arriving at them. This evasiveness gives him space to criticize
other nonbelievers regardless of how closely their ideas might resemble his
own. “Convictions never follow straight from evidence or logic,” he writes. “Convictions
reach us through the prism of human interpretation” (109). He takes this
somewhat banal observation (but do they really never follow straight from evidence?) as a license to dismiss the
arguments of others based on silly psychologizing. “In the same way that
firefighters are sometimes stealth arsonists,” he writes, “and homophobes
closet homosexuals, do some atheists secretly long for the certitude of
religion?” (88). We could of course just as easily turn this Freudian
rhetorical trap back against de Waal and his own convictions. Is he a closet
dogmatist himself? Does he secretly hold the unconscious conviction that
primates are really nothing like humans and that his research is all a big
sham?

Christopher
Hitchens was another real-life character whose personality shone through his
writing, and like Yossarian in Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 he often found
himself in a position where he knew being sane would put him at odds with the
masses, thus convincing everyone of his insanity. Hitchens particularly
identified with the exchange near the end of Heller’s novel in which an
officer, Major Danby, says, “But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way,”
to which Yossarian replies, “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any
other way, wouldn’t I?” (446). (The title for his memoir came from a
word game he and several of his literary friends played with book titles.) It
greatly saddens me to see de Waal pitting himself against such a ham-fisted
caricature of a man in whom, had he taken the time to actually explore his
writings, he would likely have found much to admire. Why did Hitch become such
a strong advocate for atheism? He made no secret of his motivations. And de
Waal, who faults Harris (wrongly) for leaving loyalty out of his moral
equations, just might identify with them. It began when the theocratic dictator
of Iran put
a hit out on his friend, the author Salman Rushdie, because he thought one
of his books was blasphemous. Hitchens writes in Hitch-22,

When
the Washington Post telephoned me at
home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was
something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a
matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column:
dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and
intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and
the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to
think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at
all. (268)

Hitchens and Rushdie

Suddenly, neo-atheism doesn’t seem like
an empty place-holder anymore. To criticize atheists so harshly for having
convictions that are too strong, de Waal has to ignore all the societal and
global issues religion is on the wrong side of. But when we consider the arguments on each side of the abortion or gay marriage or capital
punishment or science education debates it’s easy to see that neo-atheists are only against religion
because they feel it runs counter to the positive values of skeptical inquiry,
egalitarian discourse, free society, and the ascendency of reason and evidence.

De
Waal ends The Bonobo and the Atheist
with a really corny section in which he imagines how a bonobo would lecture
atheists about morality and the proper stance toward religion. “Tolerance of
religion,” the bonobo says, “even if religion is not always tolerant in return,
allows humanism to focus on what is most important, which is to build a better
society based on natural human abilities” (237). Hitchens is of course no
longer around to respond to the bonobo, but many of the same issues came up in
his debate with Tony Blair
(I hope no one reads this as an insult to the former PM), who at one point also
argued that religion might be useful in building better societies—look at all
the charity work they do for instance. Hitch, already showing signs of physical
deterioration from the treatment for the esophageal cancer that would
eventually kill him, responds,

The
cure for poverty has a name in fact. It’s called the empowerment of women. If
you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give
them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature
and some doctrine, religious doctrine, condemns them, and then if you’ll throw
in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the flaw, the flaw of everything
in that village, not just poverty, but education, health, and optimism, will
increase. It doesn’t matter—try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia. It works.
It works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that—or ever has.
Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance
and disease and stupidity from women, it is invariably the clerisy that stands
in the way. (23:05)

Later in the debate, Hitch goes on to argue in a way
that sounds suspiciously like an echo of de Waal’s challenges to veneer theory
and his advocacy for bottom-up morality. He says,

The
injunction not to do unto others what would be repulsive if done to yourself is
found in the Analects of Confucius if
you want to date it—but actually it’s found in the heart of every person in
this room. Everybody knows that much. We don’t require divine permission to
know right from wrong. We don’t need tablets administered to us ten at a time
in tablet form, on pain of death, to be able to have a moral argument. No, we
have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and of our own abilities.
We don’t need dictatorship to give us right from wrong. (25:43)

And as a last word in his case and mine I’ll quote this very de Waalian line from Hitch: “There’s actually a sense of pleasure to be had in
helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough” (35:42).